I didn't spend any time in Bangalore but it seemed like the most cosmopolitan place in the whole region - from what everyone said and the people I met from there. Is there zero infrastructure and cows wandering through every intersection?

The only place in Chennai (4th largest city in India) that didn't have cows on it was the elevated cloverleaf in the center of town - which was also the only thing resembling a modern highway or interchange.

No one seems to agree. I can't look at lines w/o semi-colons so I'm in that camp. If I have to look at your code for more than 15 seconds I will put semi-colons on every line just so I don't lose my mind.

Just be aware if you don't use a semi-colon you can't start the next line with [,(,{ or some other stuff which is legal code to start a line with. The no-semi-colon camp recommends you do this:

Thanks. I do really want/need to understand javascript. My hunt for side jobs/contract programming was pretty brief. I sent out three emails and I have one paid React project lined up as well as a couple learning/free projects with people who will help me. I have a ways to go, but I'm working very hard at it and am making definite progress. It's fun, so it's not really hard work - but I'm spending basically all the time I can on this including listening to relevant podcasts or the audio from youtubes when I'm doing something else. I basically stopped mega-posting in politics, which is a good thing in and of itself.

I will watch those videos.

I was pro-semicolon back in the day, but one of the speculative projects I've been working on is in python and I've really liked that - more than js/react (though I like that too) and the lack of semicolons grew on me. I was even liking the enforced tab/spacing and I would have expected to hate that. My javascript gets very ugly, though that's not that big a deal anymore because I just run it though prettier when it gets out of hand.

As far as node/express lessons go, anytime, at your convenience and much appreciated. The first projects aren't node/express, but I have a game that I did in phaser/js. It has a backend version in PHP and also a version in python. I'd like to do a version in node as well.

I'll be working on my python project I guess. I'm way more into a React thing right now, but that's all on my desktop and I don't want to get everything working on my cheap old laptop that barely works or have time to set anything else up to do it remotely. The python thing is way more portable.

Not just regular programmer meet-up nerd level. This Crash thing looks to be mega nerdy.

Every now and then I see a swagger file in JSON instead of YAML and want to throw up.

And you're an awesome resource. The React thing I'm doing it going to read data from a file. There will be an interface to save the data too. At first I just hard coded some sample data in the program, but I was going to put it in a JSON file. I'll look into YAML, which I've only heard people talking about on podcasts and not known what they were talking about other than it having to do with data.

I've got a side project idea that could conceivably go somewhere - but I don't have enough time to really get it going on my own. If you get some time after these projects lmk.

That would be great. When you have time we should meet to discuss. I do have a lot to do, but I'm doing some stuff purely for the learning now and if I know what might be coming up it would direct my education a bit.

And you're an awesome resource. The React thing I'm doing it going to read data from a file. There will be an interface to save the data too. At first I just hard coded some sample data in the program, but I was going to put it in a JSON file. I'll look into YAML, which I've only heard people talking about on podcasts and not known what they were talking about other than it having to do with data.

Well it depends. If a human isn't editing the file much, and JS is creating/consuming it - then JSON makes sense.

YAML to me is far superior for properties files that drive applications or behavior and are created or edited a lot by humans.

The React projects are websites and I don't even know where they'll be hosted at this point, what operating system or what permissions I'll have. Seems like that might complicate things if doing it with shell scripts.

That is an interesting idea though and if I get time I'll try it out on the linux machine I have access to.

I also don't mind rolling my own CSV format and it could really be best for this project, but I haven't done much with JSON/XML and nothing with YAML, so I want to do some. The easiest thing for me would be to just use mysql as I've used it a ton.

Yaml can have comments, you don't need to double quote everything, there's no annoying trailing comma issues to worry about, and it's much less code w/o all those curly braces. Absolutely no comparison imo.

I'd like to see all the developer hours wasted on missing or extra trailing commas in JSON files.

Few things I've worked with don't barf on trailing commas. Also no comments is a huge PITA.

We always put our JSON configs in .js files and then require them from node - specifically so we don't have to deal with the extreme strictness. But of course package.json you can't do that and I pretty much always have at least one trailing comma fail every time I have to mess with it. My linter should probably catch that but it doesn't and I haven't bothered to mess with it.

Look at the JSON example above with 5 closing braces looking like some kind of ascii art mario floating staircase, whereas the YAML one just ends. It's so pretty it makes me want to cry. Think of all the wasted space just to show those meaningless (to humans) 5 lines.

The first time you boil down an HTML file into a jade template you see the amazingness of programmatic indentation.